Beauty, Mercy, Justice

The Current Beneath the Waves

There is a world of difference between the weekend sailor who observing the waves embarks with a map and a weather report and the seasoned mariner who knows the currents beneath the waves and can read in the winds and clouds the coming weather.

And a world away from either of them is the nearsighted novice who sets out in a leaky vessel and last year’s week’s weather report.

Which is about as apt an image of the architects of American foreign policy as I can conjure.

Michael Vlahos, who is, as his byline obliquely tells us, "principal professional staff at the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory", is more like the reader of currents and clouds than otherwise.

His article
The Fall of Modernity, in the current issue of The American Conservative, is breathtaking in its scope and depth. Mr Vlahos’ ability to fathom the currents and patterns of history, to
grasp the inner realities of rise and fall, of empire and its narratives, reads more like prophetic utterance than political commentary or historical analysis.

And I suspect those in power- or scrambling for power- are about as likely to welcome his dark meditation on our times as the blow-dried prophets of
prosperity are to quote the Lamentations of Jeremiah at length.

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5 Responses

I’ve only had time to read about half of it, and am going to be away from computers for the next 48 hours or so, so won’t be able to finish it until then. So far I find a lot worth thinking about, but am wondering if he doesn’t get a bit carried away in somewhat the same way that the people he’s criticizing do–that is, making things bigger than they really are.

I must say, though, that I have had certain alarm bells going off all along about some of the American reaction to 9/11, even though I’ve been more willing than many here to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. It’s in certain phrases (“they hate us because we’re free”), in the clumsy eagerness with which some of the more war-eager conservatives (e.g. many at National Review) leapt to equate this to WWII, in the determination to see what seems to me a relatively manageable threat as a global life-and-death struggle.

Having read the whole thing now, I have the sense of trying to pick things out through a fog–his rhetoric seems overblown (“florid,” at least, as Chris says). I’m not sure what to make of a phrase like “the end of modernity.” It seems way overblown, like Fukayama’s famous “end of history.”

I do think there’s a valid insight here, though, about the deeply symbolic power of 9/11 as a challenge to the whole American conception of the world and expectation of the future. I especially liked this:

Because the national narrative is a sacred retelling of God’s message and His American mission, its periodic restaging always assumes the form of a great war—revolution, civil war, world war. But after 9/11, there was no great war to be had, so we created a simulacrum. Up to a point, we might keep it looking like a war. But at last it will not perform for us. It cannot support the demands of the drama we require. What we needed was a grand yet simple story with easy enemies and a ringing ending called victory.

Apparently I am the only one who was blown away by this piece.
Among the many things I appreciated was his ability to dispassionately and even sympathetically view movements most often demonized by intellectuals, like Islam and Pentecostalism.